"Thus this chapter will explore how the film reimagines the stage version in four significant ways. First, the Phantom's drastically different face renders him a potentially viable love interest for Christine, but eliminates the only justification for his evil deeds: that society would so obviously shun him. This change of the Phantom from horrifying creature to insecure loner led to three other changes: the complete erasure of all of the Phantom's magical unexplained powers and feats; the addition of a significant back story meant to create sympathy and justification for the Phantom's murders and isolation; and the steep lowering of the main characters' ages to render the story more of a youthful awakening than an adult love triangle. We will see that by making the Phantom more handsome, more human, and more sympathetic, the message that Christine could never choose him over Raoul is meant to be more romantic and heartbreaking, but becomes instead a harsh indictment of our own social expectations and stigmas about disability."

This chapter examines connections between research in music, neurology, and psychology during the late-nineteenth century. Researchers in all three disciplines investigated how music is processed by the brain. Psychologists and comparative musicologists, such as Carl Stumpf, thought in terms of multiple levels of sensory processing and mental representation. Early thinking about music processing can be linked to the start of Gestalt psychology. Neurologists such as August Knoblauch also discussed multiple levels of music processing, basing speculation on ideas about language processing. Knoblauch and others attempted to localize music function in the brain. Other neurologists, such as John Hughlings Jackson, discussed a dissociation between music as an emotional system and language as an intellectual system. Richard Wallaschek seems to have been the only one from the late-nineteenth century to synthesize ideas from musicology, psychology, and neurology. He used ideas from psychology to explain music processing and audience reactions and also used case studies from neurology to support arguments about the nature of music. Understanding the history of this research sheds light on the development of all three disciplines—musicology, neurology, and psychology.

"This chapter focuses on The Phantom of the Opera, the megamusical that perhaps most boldly faces the idea of disability head-on, as it stars a character whose face, as one journalist described it, looks 'like melted cheese' (Smith, 1995). The musical's approach to the Phantom's disability is remarkably layered and inconsistent; the Phantom is portrayed in numerous ways (monster, criminal, genius, god, ghost) and his physical disability blurs regularly with his 'soul;' which is where numerous characters locate the origin of his problems. His face and its famous mask covering are both feared and thrilled over, but with a reassuring dose of pity that allows the audience to feel comfortable leaning forward to catch a glimpse. How, in the supposedly more enlightened culture of the 1980s (and today, as the show continues to thrive), can we justify what is, at base, a modern version of a circus freak show? And how does the musical shield the audience from feeling that it is? The musical's atmosphere, style, music, and lyrics create such a seductive sense of romance and tragic inevitability-cushioned with an extra layer of 'historical' distance-that the discomfort we should feel is swept away by megamusical momentum."

The evolution of our knowledge about how the brain processes music holds an important place in the history of neurology. An examination of early neurology literature reveals that music abilities were occasionally examined in an attempt to better understand brain function; in particular, music was used as a tool to assess patients with aphasia. Early neurologists were fascinated by the observation that some patients with severe expressive aphasia were able to sing the texts of songs. This observation became a theme in nineteenth-century neurology literature that was discussed by some of the most prominent neurologists at the time, including John Hughlings Jackson and Jean-Baptiste Bouillaud.

"Music has played a role in human culture since before recorded history, serving ritual, functional, and entertainment purposes. But music can also be studied as a product of human perception and cognition. It is considered both perceptual and cognitive because it involves sensory processing on two levels: the progress of sound through our auditory physiological system (perception), and the processing of that sound into higher-order conceptual thinking about music (cognition). The study of music perception and cognition is traced from its roots in the 17th c., through late–19th-c. work in physiology, psychology and neurology, and into the 20th c. During the late 20th c. the study of music sensation and cognition developed into a fairly unified field of intellectual inquiry, one in which psychologists, neuroscientists, music theorists, and musicologists participate. This field is generally referred to as 'music perception' and today is part of mainstream scholarly and educational institutions, with a large and growing literature of scientific research."